DETECTIVE COMICS #519

"...LIKE A DREADNOUGHT IN THE SKY!"
Plot Gerry Conway | Script: Paul Kupperberg
Pencils: Don Newton | Inks: John Calnan
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Adrienne Roy | Editor: Len Wein

The Plot: Batman is in Washington, D.C. on a top from the Navy, and watches from atop the Washington Monument as a zeppelin enters D.C. airspace, broadcasting a ransom demand from Colonel Blimp -- ten million dollars for the submarine and warship he has captured, along with their crews. Batman hitches a ride aboard the ship, but finds a detonation device inside. He exits quickly, just before the hydrogen-powered blimp explodes and crashes.

Later, at the Batcave, the Batcomputer has pinpointed the likely location of the captured Naval craft, in the arctic. Batman dispatches Robin in the Batplane to investigate, while Batman drives the Batmobile to New Jersey on a hunch. Sure enough, he finds Blimp's hangar in the woods and sneaks inside, where he learns that the Department of the Navy has agreed to Blimp's demand. Meanwhile, Robin arrives in the arctic and finds the captured ship and sub, landlocked on the ice. He asks the battleship's crew to get the guns in working order, and soon afterward, a zeppelin dispatched by Blimp arrives. Its crew disembarks and is captured by the sailors, while Robin boards the airship and contacts Blimp, telling him his scheme is blown.

Batman takes that cue to show himself. He knocks out Blimp's men and confronts the villain, who gets off a single shot before Batman knocks him out and takes him into custody.

BATMAN #352

"THE KILLER SKY!"
Plot Gerry Conway | Script: Paul Kupperberg
Artist: Don Newton | Inker: John Calnan
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Carl Gafford | Editor: Dick Giordano

The Plot: In the North Atlantic Ocean, a zeppelin emerges from the fog and uses a tractor beam to steal a military submarine. The next night, Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale are in attendance at a party abaord a cruise ship when the same zeppelin appears and steals a nearby battleship. While Vicki takes photos of the incident, Bruce ducks away and changes to Batman. He snags the airship with a batline, but the vessel's commander, Colonel Blimp, dispatches his henchmen to deal with the Caped Crusader.

The men attack Batman and eventually knock him off their craft, but they're unaware that he has left a tracking devise lodged in the hull. Later, a battered Batman arrives at the Batcave and explains to Alfred and Dick that he fell through a canopy of trees, using the foliage to break his fall. Despite his injuries, Batman insists on following his tracker, and Robin insists on joining him. Soon, the Batmobile drives through the morning light in the New Jersey countryside, in search of Blimp's blimp. But the Dynamic Duo drive over a landmine, which detonates and totals the Batmobile. After escaping this deathtrap, Batman spots his tracking device attached to a nearby tree. Elsewhere, in a long-abandoned zeppelin hangar, Blimp addresses his men with a speech about having killed Batman and making the world pay for what it has done.

Continuity Notes: In the story's opening pages, Batman visits Jim Gordon's hospital room, where the former commissioner is recovering from the beating he received in last week's DETECTIVE COMICS #518. As Batman lurks outside the window, he sees Barbara Gordon and Jason Bard visit Gordon, followed by the arrival of Commissioner Pauling and Officer McClosky, the man who led the beating. Batman enters the room and scares off the corrupt cops, after which Gordon asks the Masked Manhunter for help in exposing Mayor Hill's corruption.

(On a side-note, I feel like Paul Kupperberg's script this issue could've used a bit more input from editor Dick Giordano. In the span of two pages and eleven panels, Batman thinks to himself, "What have they done to you, old friend?" then greets Gordon verbally with "How are you feeling, old friend?", followed two panels later by Gordon saying, "Jason and I've gone as far as we can on this, old friend..." I get it, Paul. They're old friends.)

BATMAN #309 & #310

"HAVE YOURSELF A DEADLY LITTLE CHRISTMAS!"
"THE GHOST WHO HAUNTED BATMAN"
Writer: Len Wein
Artists (issue 309): John Calnan & Frank McLaughlin
Artists (issue 310): Irv Novick & Dick Giordano
Colorist: Glynis Wein | Letterer: Ben Oda | Editor: Julius Schwartz

Picking up from the final scene of the prior issue, BATMAN #311 opens with the Blockbuster, Batman's Hulk-like villain, beating up some purse snatchers and then departing to return the purse to its owner. Meanwhile, Batman and Commissioner Gordon exchange Christmas gifts. But when they find that a desk sergeant is on the phone with a girl attempting suicide-by-sleeping pills, Batman departs in a hurry to find her. It turns out she's the victim of the purse-snatch, and Blockbuster finds her before Batman. The girl faints from the bottle of pills, Blockbuster takes her away to find help.

Naturally, this leads to Batman and Blockbuster crossing paths a few times, and while Blockbuster wants to help the girl, he refuses to let Batman take her to a hospital, since -- following his "death" at STAR Labs last issue -- he believes hospitals hurt people. Nonetheless, when their chase takes them out onto a frozen lake that cracks apart, Blockbuster throws the girl into Batman's arms as he sinks into the water of Gotham Bay. Batman gets the girl to an ambulance and her life is saved.

This is the kind of story where you honestly don't know which way it will go. We're so deep into the Bronze Age at this point, that there's just as good a chance the girl could die as there is that Batman could save her -- which gives the story an air of suspense that might otherwise have been missing were it published a few years earlier. There are no sub-plots in this one, either -- it's wall-to-wall Batman vs. Blockbuster action, which is always a nice change of pace in any sub-plot heavy series. Though I sometimes complain that such issues are "filler" without any sub-plots, in this case, for whatever reason, it doesn't feel that way.

BATMAN #307 & #308

"DARK MESSENGER OF MERCY!"
"THERE'LL BE A COLD TIME IN THE OLD TOWN TONIGHT!"
Writer: Len Wein | Artists: John Calnan & Dick Giordano
Colorist: Glynis Wein | Letterer: Ben Oda | Editor: Julius Schwartz

As mentioned a couple weeks back, from this point forward, we'll be seeing a lot of Len Wein. He wrote BATMAN for nearly two years, covering issues 307 through 327. His run begins inauspiciously, though, with "Dark Messenger of Mercy". It seems (as glimpsed briefly in Wein's framing sequence to DETECTIVE COMICS #477), someone is wandering around, murdering Gotham City's vagrants and leaving gold coins to cover their closed eyes. Batman of course gets involved, visits Commissioner Gordon, meets a homeless community living beneath Gotham, and ultimately brings the killer to justice.

Wein throws in a twist and has Batman use some legitimate detective work to solve the case, so those are a couple of pluses in this tale's favor -- but overall, it's just kind of boring. It feels like a sub-par done-in-one from the early part of the seventies; something Denny O'Neil or Frank Robbins would've produced with the help of Bob Brown or Irv Novick. In fact, the only thing that helps this issue to not feel like such a one-off is Wein's introduction of a sub-plot. Specifically, Bruce Wayne learns in the story's opening pages that reclusive billionaire Gregorian Falstaff has bought Gotham's Ambassador Hotel and moved himself into the upper floors. The Falstaff plot will sporadically carry on (and on, and on) for the entirety of Wein's run, and not even be resolved until his successor, Marv Wolfman, takes over writing chores on BATMAN!

Bruce learns about Falstaff from his newly introduced right-hand man, a Wayne Foundation executive named Lucius Fox. Fox, here in his very first appearance, will prove to be Wein's most enduring contribution to Batman's mythos, appearing in several movie and TV spinoffs beginning somewhere around the early nineties with BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. He was, of course, famously portrayed by Morgan Freeman in Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy in the mid-00s.